Hoth
by Shadowfire2013
Summary: Here in the frozen wastelands, the warrior lives. Here underneath the clear sky, he remembers and hopes. Here on Hoth, this forgotten soul prays to dead gods.  Post NJO, Short Story
1. Hoth

Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again.

Ash Wednesday- T. S. Eliot

* * *

Under the twilight of that year, the warrior sat atop the summit of the cordillera like some dark and leprous atlas, gaunt limpid arms outstretched and hands risen up as if to hold some unseen and pillaged altar bereft of its tapestries and its sacristies poured out as of blood, clad in only the macre scars like popped pustules and the rotting carcass of his armor held to him by its ragged and threadbare nodes. Decrepit amphistaff coiled round his torso in some fathomable need. Gibbets of snow on him and his discarded cloak and knapsack like some predatorial moss taking what it would from those things which presented no consternation or reproach and the wind was vengeful in form and manner and butchered each atom of flesh there present as it whistled in the air. Like some piper tune leading away to death with high pitched soliloquies.

The cold was beyond his adjectives. His descriptors. Set outright in its nature as a challenge. Firmer then the rocks he'd settled and touched. Greater in height and breadth than those mountains. Both transient and corporeal as some three headed cerebrus bounding in the fog with tottering slackjaws. Fine sharpened incisors deep in his marrow and cartilage to masticate in the days. And the nights. To make itself some measurable deity for him to fall down and worship.

Above him there lingered the canopy of clouds like some ceaseless shroud stretched about the world with smoke woven threads by a seamstress so long at the wheel that her hair was aged into spider's linen and hands hook-like and epileptic and dots of free wheeling snow mingled throughout it like dust motes descended from each buried and forgotten mountain torn down in the ages by wind and water and man and war. He searched through its tresses. For what he knew in his dreams and thoughts, but it had none of it. Just figments. His hands caught snowflakes and against the length of his fingers, they stayed and did not melt.

He took the valley in. Its tern spectrum of white, gray and black; the flatness of it like the side of some felled sword acting as a fulcrum for what lay beyond the horizon's curved edge. Crossing it were thumbnail sized bipeds, more than two dozen in number, raising behind clouds and tracts as their tails swept behind them like rudders and the horns atop their heads like rotted crowns and he bade them hello but they brooked no retort and continued onward as nomads fearing not what would come but had.

He spoke to himself and each gust of wind lent a differentiation of timber to his voice and gave each sentence a sentience unknown to the warrior before the numbered years and in the two was both murderer and sinner and he said, I cannot feel my hands.

I know.

It does not hurt.

I know.

And without that pain, the gods will not hear my cries.

No.

No?

For I am the last of their children with whom they are much displeased.

He went to his knees and braced the ground with his forehead, mouth kissing the ice, and he smote himself with his fists as he spoke. As if to consecrate those words with motions to fill their hollow souls and make some memory of which to cling to.

And-

He prayed to dead gods.

* * *

Past that hour, the warrior went down the slopes, cloak wrapped about his shoulders like a shawl, abetting the shivers along his skin by staying his hands to the fur. Scarred from their nature. Marked with deep written wrinkles. Calloused digits spitten with white tumoric lines. His breath trailed behind him. A vague cloud of kanjis gone beyond their half lives; transitory and swept away in any breeze that crossed his path.

He waded through the knee high snow; created a wake to be mapped and measured. Though the falling flakes would clear it from any memory or sight or thought. As he double backed on the trail he had once made, there stood two judges. Horned like devils with golden coin eyes and claws dug deep into the haunches of the biped they dragged with them. Reddened teeth and tufts of fur clumped with the same dark liquid. Their foul stench like curdled vomit. And their height like giants. They did not move but watched him, tracked him as he bowed and backed away. Face to the ground and eyes rolled upwards like a traitorous servant expectant of the axe. Taking a step. Then another, till he passed the bend and went another way. Epileptic fingers and tightened diaphragm and dry mouth with a bleeding tongue. Symptoms and villains.

Coming down, he passed fumaroles, warm and engrained with pommels of smoke like pillars and columns and when he passed his hand through them some other pulse quickened into his blood and returned to it a measure of strength and he marveled at such until the ash coated his tongue in a stale layer and he moved on. There were other wonders upon those mountains. Chasms and the ice which spanned them. Pitiless drops cradling abject splintered bones. Beam bridges lined with squatters beneath their ways and etched portents along the sides. Composed entirely of sagely blue ice. Bubbled air locked into the layers like amber. Some burst open on the surface and others like gilded spheres spun free of their momentum and left in a vacuum.

He went to his knees and crossed by making shallow cuts in the solidified frore and filling those thin raveens with his fingernails and pulling himself forward like a cripple and did not blink and nailed his eyes forward and said breathe and breathe again. He did not wander his eyes, nor his mind, nor his lips for God and when he had crossed he found a divot in the wall and slept there.

* * *

In his dream there was a trail through the mountains lit by a child with an emerald orb in one hand and torch in the other; the path trodden through by his forbearers, the snow run slipshod and trampled by their footsteps and the imprint of their boots petrified and solid. Messages scrawled into the stone with dark blood. Relics strewn behind and nailed like ancient paintings. Hairs and scalps and idols and heretics and heathen. The light just beyond him like a lure. And above those monuments, statues of men cut from the granite with open eyes and mouths. Each of them whispering a single word and verse he could not decipher and the girl herself a mute and a deaf and when he reached to succor her all fell to night and he was afraid.

* * *

He woke to the sound of concussions and the rattling of small stones above his head and in his fugue he looked up as rootlike trails of fire and smoke swept through the cloud cover and trailed across the sky with bits of shrapnel raining behind them as of crushed petals. Past the mountains they went like banshees and the ice cracked around him and splintered into numerous cleavages and the bridge he had crossed was struck down and fell into the pit and on the plains a great sigh went up with a diffuse spurt of fog as it cratered into the earth.

He could feel his heart again. The steady beat of it in his throat; the thrumming of his blood through his veins and arteries and going into his arms and legs and warming them. Like the returning of some lost prodigal son long thought dead. His mouth hung open and humid eyes. The dampness of their moment on his eyelashes freezing over and refracting his sight with multiple realities.

Brother, he said, what is this and rose up and went down the slopes as the gray light filtered down to show him the way.

* * *

He was led to the vessel by the trough plowed through the snow and he walked in the wake with a pebble in his palm. The soil he took it from was blackened and rough and it smelled of smoke and bits of metal were deposited in it and dark gradients stayed underneath his fingernails. The piece of rock itself was rough and igneous and at one time its porous shell was birthed among fire and ash but now it possessed only an alien cold and he rolled it between his forefinger and thumb.

The ship was a memory of itself and as he came near its wounds were made more real and more distinguishable. Open holes scattered throughout its hull with the sharpened metal flung inward and tears slung along its top like some foreign form of circumcision and the light of its engine dim and dead. The whole of it as divested and stripped cadaver lying about in the light with its spilled out innards draped across the ground.

He circled around the crater and peered into the cockpit where the glass was broken into canines and half of the pilot lay impaled upon a stripling of steel and he stayed there for some time and then circled to the other side. This one held a hole in its ribs the size of his own stature and he could not make anything out and he went in.

He went through the hole exposing the rib of the non-beast, taking pains to watch his step. Upon the ground were scattered…. _machines…_ lain out as if resting from their duties, various snippets of glass scattering the artificial yellow light of the flickering sun onto the occasional outstretched hand, limp and severed. He picked it the limb up and threw aside the pebble and it clattered in the din and then explored the intersections of fate, life and love said to exist in the wrinkles. All he saw was discarded muscle carefully aligned for motor movement, a thin layer of skin wrapped round to contain it, and the loss of existence.

So he tried to whisper to it some truth to soften the owner's false soul but he was interrupted by the sudden clatter of in the rear of the ship. An abrupt sudden rustling of feet bumbling against walls in a drunken manner. The amphistaff coiled around his arm hissed slightly into the air as if challenging the survivor, its head moving side to side in a hidden rhythm.

He was unsurprised at the news that blood still flowed. He said nothing, but continued inward towards the belly hidden in shadow. The corridors swept into his peripheral, step by step, until what he saw before him was a two huddling figures holed up against a corner. One sat nestled against the leaking belly, full of dripping red life. The other was pointed at him while clutching the barrel of a blaster.

The maw of it stayed in shadow.

Stay back, the creature said. Stay back.

He said nothing, but lowered himself into a crouch and waited. Was _this_ thing a lie?

The human was a small thing, clad in a uniform of azure and unnatural white that matched its skin. He titled his head. A woman too, young.

Not like the fortune teller.

It..she cried out again. If you move…I'll kill you.

Minutes passed by as her words remained unchanging in the air, repeated in stanzas. Her arm tried to stay steady, jerking back upwards into its original position following each strained breath. But then the light failed and her will lost its grip over her body.

He gazed at her for many moments and even more heartbeats. The trickle of blood leeking out her side and the quiet, hushed breath. The tattered clothes turned dark.

He reached over and took the blaster from her and placed it on the ground with distaste, and sat back and watched her.

He thought that he might save her but he wasn't sure.

* * *

He counted heresies for every piece of tangled cloth he pulled from chilled bodies- thirty five-, for every scrap of machinery that brushed against probing fingers or the accidental movement of a wayward limbs-innumerate-, for ever stitch he sowed into her side- sixteen- and wondered why it was, - as he sat there against the bulkhead, - why he felt like laughing.

He woke before she did. Tradition was still found in the muscles corded about his body even though the will that moved it only had dim recollections interrupted by sudden sporadic bursts of imagery. The easiness of thrusting an amphistaff through his brother's unprotected gut. The grunt of air against his ear that sounded like congratulations. How much more difficult it was to pull the blade free, let the body rock the floor as hend smiled in victory. The terrible heaviness of Al'Shimrra's the overlord's rainbow gaze.

The emerald planet held aloft in the eye of his ship which spoke of history, ancient relatives and….

He made it a point to appear as if he had never slept by standing. From there, he saw her eyes flash open and closed- thin interjections of sapphire. The slow lethargy of her limbs as they moved to study herself, moving from her stomach to the thin cut of hair on hair hidden slightly by the villip colored bandage. But then otiosity gave way to a sudden halt, as if she had frozen in fear save for her eyes and head which twisted about like a demon unleashed.

There was a question. A preponderance on his chest that needed longed to for escape. Are you Yun-Harla? he asked.

She stared. No.

He grinned and handed her the blaster in his hand.

That is a start.

* * *

For the first thirty seconds she thought of how wonderful his face would look if it were transformed into a glowing crater of burnt meatflesh. Of how those ebony eyes so filled with madness would disappear under a glorious red bolt and how his scream would be short. Oh so short, like a thread of yarn cut too soon.

For the next minute, she focused on how easy it would be to bury the body. Of how pleasure would course through her veins, spreading out from her heart to her head, along her spine with the delicate hands of a lover when she threw the last pit of snow over that cursed body.

For the next hour, she tried not to think of pyres of flesh and wood in the night or of tattooed dancers singing to gods for thanks. Hymns of sacrifice, entreaties of strength, and guttural screams of her dying world--she tried to think of anything. Anything but the face of her nightmares smiling there before her.

The rest was more trying.

She finished eating the paltry feast laid around her before she talked.

You didn't kill me, she whispered. Wondering. Confused. Anger simmering under beneath the questions.

Puul. No.

Why?

This is hell and heaven is not within grasp.

Is that supposed to mean something?

I think so.

You don't seem to believe yourself.

It is not necessary for living.

That's not how Yuuzhan Vong live.

You are right.

That is not how they lived.

Aren't you one of them?

No. The Yuuzhan Vong are dead.

I see.

Laconism stayed the non-beast's belly till dawn, even their breaths too small to hear.

* * *

There was no light to herald morning, only snow turning grey between ground and covered sky and when she rose she went through the bodies, coveting what values and trinkets could be found in their homunculi, carrying forth her the blaster in one hand, index finger resting below the trigger, and a thin flashlight between her teeth.. She pecked through only certain passengers who bore the image of still life and whose wounds were limited by comparison, and shut their eyes with her passing. Fingers highlighted their pockets; came away with spare few credits and the odd knickknack. Some foreign coins, scraps of paper embroidered with poetry, a locket with a halfwashed out holo. She spun the picture in the air and placed it back in the pocket.

She keyed in vague treatises of existentialism and nihilism in the scattered touch displays but the monitors lay dim, unknowledgeable and possessing no samaratin inclination and in her frustration she saddled up against the wall and beat it with the base of her hand. To which he was witness. At those times she saw him do such, she gestured away with the blaster and he adhered to such biddings and waited outside on the manifold.

The lined stitches ached for her.

Some of the panels were scattered about, revealing the multicolored wiring and she traced it through the ship like some medicinal cartographer appraising the complexities of the form but not the soul and she came upon a burned and degraded area where the would be beacon uttered off a dimming and slowing red light to which it died as a thin ember. Hardly crimson. She squatted near it and pressed against its skin and came away with blackened palms and cursed with an unbefitting tongue filled with a broader base of diction and slang than appropriate. She cleaned them against her slacks; her head hung in her hands. What to do. Possibly nothing.

Hoth. The name.

She rose up, stuck to her mind longitude and latitude of that memorial hidden in the tundra, and went outside and the cold buried through her layers like a lance and she gasped. As he watched, she looked up. Light was still dim on the horizon; enough parted clouds to measure the stars. Certain ones were out whose names returned to her and she took their measure and calculated vectors and angles and came away looking at the world's edge with her estimation.

She returned to the ship and gathered what she would. Food, water, a lumilamp, a slim vibroknife, some oil from a banister. Blaster tucked into her waistband. Canteen filled. She found a knapsack and sequestered her supplies within it. Clothed herself in the heaviest raiment. Pulled the ensemble together.

Went outside once more.

You'll die if you go out there, he said, perched behind her on the hull.

I've made it through worse. I can manage a little snow.

You have much faith in your God to assume that the elements cannot break you.

She spat it out as a curse. You don't need deities to live Vong.

And forward, she went into the plains.

* * *

He piled the bodies in the hold and doused them with what oil she had not commandeered and prayed before striking out sparks with twin sheets of metal. For their lives, for their journey to God. He asked his dead lords for such. The volcanic embers rode into the oil and danced along its length, consuming the bodies, rendering them as they once were. To their basic elements. The lithe red flames overlaying the low running blue in seasonal plumage.

He kneeled outside the ship and watched the fire rise up. As pinpoints of light from which the darkness could be held off. To grasp and to hold and to be the sign and portent for things in their becoming. In their beginnings. To serve as both a beacon and a memorial for those yet unborn.

Held his face in the snow; would not sunder so much those flames with his eyes. Brother, is she the witness? Could she be? Forgive me, for I have not heard the word these many years.

* * *

Ask her of their fate and the doubts will be stripped to nothing. That the children of gods are long dead and brooked no passage beyond purgatory. As their sins remanded. There can be no question of this. What did that oracle foretell? That she should be taken for a sign and be this exile's release. This can not be.

but follow her still, in that unlikely case

* * *

She saw things in between the swirls of ice. Daggers of frozen water. Teeth of a dead legend used to scare children. Burning fire in the sculptures of snowflakes thrown from the headwind. Texts stacked together. Ink and leather bound together in matrimony. Knowledge yet undimmed, the universe held captive by trimmed fingernails and uncalloused fingertips. Poems. Epics. Ballads. Tomes. Stories of all magnitude and virtue crushed into the embers of her breath.

Frozen air, frozen past, and all the emptiness to hold it.

She swayed, hearing melodies in the whispers of bladed wind and forgot how it was to fall.

The lyrics to the forgotten song writ large in earthbound snow. Brother, my brother. Where have you gone?

The beacon of salvation called to her against the darkness and went unheard.

* * *

He stood above her and found it a simple thing to hold his amphistaff above her fallen form as white powder mounted her in thin layers. A miniscule effort of will compounded against gravity's laws in defiance. That of an avian flying against a typhoon. Meaningless, but not. So long as the eye followed its inevitable fall.

It would be so easy to plunge it into her back. To see the false red blood spilled on this galaxy's altar. A cry of tragedy that would echo on to infinity would be the proof, though there would be no judges to see, no hordes to cheer the act.

So very easy to end instead of begin…and so much sweeter on the tongue…

No.

Not here. Not now. Not again.

She was not Vong. The curse afflicted upon his people was not hers to bear.

For the conquerors, heaven was still within reach. For the conquerors, life still glittered with their god's presence.

For the conquerors, there was still room to serve in something other than cold vacuum.

And if that was so, if there was truth in it…

…there was the possibility that redemption could be found in this wayward soul.

He laid down his weapon and plied frozen water with trembling hands.

And still he beseeched the dead.

* * *

Author's Note- I am in the process of revising the older chapters to make them, in all things, better and more pleasing to the trained reader. Thank you for bearing with me and I hope my older readers will enjoy the alterations.


	2. Millstones about our Necks

The first condition of the first day- Navigation by Way of Stars and a Small Hope- A fire- Inner Dialogue and Commentary- Deterred Traveling

* * *

When she woke it was his face that she saw and for that brief moment where she held the blaster in her hand and could feel the warmed and edged contours of it molding into her palm with the fingers traced along the barrel and the forefinger against the capacitor and the thumb stroking the safety, she accounted his face and in a memory from a distant world where she and her brother had huddled together in the ruins as a pyre born of flesh and metal rose up in hellish display as the yuuzhan vong did dance about the pit and its shrill screams, naked save for the blood smeared along their bodies like oil and paint, spouting out tribal chants on battle and death with the etchings of their shadow features engraved large against the buildings did that visage yet coincide.

The ebony eyes and the lipless and nose less gaze smeared with a canine tooth grin and scars lined about underneath the blue sac lids in the forms of mazes were seen and in her instinct she pulled up the blaster and fired a single shot into the mass of his thigh and he cupped the smoking crater in his leg and howled through pursed teeth as she rose up, holding one hand to the bandage, and stepped to him and placed the blaster to his head.

What the kriff did you do me? Poison me? Huh? When he did not answer, she belted him across the cheek with the butt and it thudded against the bone and a small token of spittle and blood was thrown out of his mouth and his face was turned from her and she could not make out his expression. Answer me.

Her voice trembled and all the moisture had leapt from it and the faint beginnings of a shiver wove up her spine as along those corridors came a shrill gust shaved by the angular geometries and debris into some form of damned screams.

I would do no such thing, he said and touched his blood and marveled at in the fashion of a dumb, his voice roughened as if by gravel. Such a cowardly action.

Like hell I believe that.

I could have let you bleed or cut out your heart, he said. But I did not. You still yet stand, your wounds bound and stitched. There is no quarrel between us.

I'll decide that, she said and leaned against the wall and used it as a crux. And when she looked over the vong once more, she attributed to him what crimes his people had done unto her family and her acquaintances and her own flesh and the lands which they all had dwelt upon and burnt but she had no strength to it though she did wish for it. Could she kill hi- it. This thing. In one such flicking of a finger. She sworn she had such a capacity some days ago.

Then I should take part as well.

I've got the gun.

Yes. You do, and he rose up and before she could register the patter of his feet he was to her and holding her blaster in his hands once more and threw it away into the corridor. With its passing went her courage and she was weak-kneed and faint. But that is not such a constant. He grabbed her by the shoulders and took her to the mattress and sat her on it. Now we can discuss these things as befitting us.

Don't touch me. Don't.

If that is a precondition, then I will give you one as well. He took her jaw and squeezed it and said, do not shoot me again, and released it. He limped out to the hallway and picked up the gun as she stared wide-eyed and set it on the mattress and leaned against the wall and stared at her. Puss began to leak out of his leg and ran down the length of it and the blackened broken skin stared at her with the pink muscle exposed and the odor wafted. He seemed to have forgotten it and spat out some blood on the floor.

What are you going to do? She said and huddled herself closer with the blaster in her grip. It was cold to her and gave no comfort with the stock pressed to her ribs.

These are the other rules you shall abide by. Do not leave the ship this night or the next. Sustain yourself. Keep warm. Otherwise, do as you will.

And if I don't?

Then you will die, he said. That is fact.

You're going to kill me. Or sacrifice me, or whatever you vong do, she said in a near hysteria.

Then believe you me; that the yuuzhan vong have been dead these many years and are far gone. And as of their bloodlust, it was long ago sated.

She shook her head, Liar, liar.

There is nothing I can do for you then. You may take my word or you may not. Until then, I will be outside, and he left clutching his leg.

Calming herself, she waited for a minute from his departure before rising up and going through the ship like an awakened comatose, hand steadied by the walls and bulkheads and trailing bits of wire and choking on the small wisps of smoke present and the goose bumps trailing along her spine from the cold. Now when she came upon the dead, she checked them over with a critical eye, taking notes of their wound placements and the state of them and when she found none to bear witness of the vong's crimes she paused and thought and its current lasted her all the night as she wrapped herself in some sheets and shivered in the bed like she had as a child.

* * *

There was no light to herald morning, only snow turning grey between ground and covered sky and when she rose she went through the bodies, coveting what values and trinkets could be found in their homunculi, carrying forth her the blaster in one hand, index finger resting below the trigger, and a thin flashlight between her teeth. She pecked through only those passengers who bore the image of still life and whose wounds were limited by comparison, and shut their eyes with her passing. Fingers highlighted their pockets; came away with spare few credits and the odd knickknack. Some foreign coins, scraps of paper embroidered with poetry, a locket with a half washed out holo. She spun the picture in the air and placed it back in the pocket.

She keyed in vague treatises of existentialism and nihilism in the scattered touch displays but the monitors lay dim, unknowledgeable and possessing no samaratin inclination and in her frustration she saddled up against the wall and beat it with the base of her hand. To which he was witness. At those times she saw him do such, she gestured away with the blaster and he adhered to such biddings and waited outside on the manifold.

The lined stitches ached for her.

Some of the panels were scattered about, revealing the multicolored wiring and she traced it through the ship like some medicinal cartographer appraising the complexities of the form but not the soul and she came upon a burned and degraded area where the would be beacon uttered off a dimming and slowing red light to which it died as a thin ember. Hardly crimson. She squatted near it and pressed against its skin and came away with blackened palms and cursed with an unbefitting tongue filled with a broader base of diction and slang than appropriate. She cleaned them against her slacks; her head hung in her hands. What to do. Possibly nothing.

The name of the world she inhabited came to her.

She rose up, stuck to her mind longitude and latitude of that memorial hidden in the tundra, and went outside and the cold buried through her layers like a lance and she gasped. As he watched, she looked up. Light was still dim on the horizon; enough parted clouds to measure the stars. Certain ones were out whose names returned to her and she took their measure and calculated vectors and angles and came away looking at the world's edge with her estimation.

She returned to the ship and gathered what she would. Food, water, a lumilamp, a slim vibroknife, some oil from a banister poured into a bottle, the locket stored in her locker. Blaster tucked into her waistband. Canteen filled. She found a knapsack and sequestered her supplies within it. Clothed herself in the heaviest raiment and layers. Pulled the ensemble together. Went outside once more.

Looked at the horizon and tightened the straps, the buckles and breathed in the dry air through the sheet of cotton with icicles already formed by the wetness of her lips.

Where do you intend to go? This is not some place where you can wander at your leisure, your whim, he said and swept his hand out. Do you not see this world as it is? Barren. Fruitless. A pause and quieter, Godless.

It isn't any concern of yours what I do.

It is.

Wrong there scarface. Bout as far off from right as you can get.

Should you do this, yours will not be the only death. But the child's as well. Do not be foolish, await your rescue.

I know what I'm doing, she said and turned to look at him, so shut it. And one other thing, she patted the blaster, don't follow me or this time I'll take off your head.

Then she marched out under that sky, all stalwart and alone, the mountains of which she went to slumbering in a white haze, the wind whipping about her legs in a growing fury and the warrior himself incanting and motionless and fallen down on the ground with her passing.

* * *

He piled the bodies in the hold and doused them with what oil she had not commandeered and prayed before striking out sparks with twin sheets of metal. For their lives, for their journey to God. He asked his dead lords for such. The volcanic embers rode into the oil and danced along its length, consuming the bodies, rendering them as they once were. To their basic elements. The lithe red flames overlaying the low running blue in seasonal plumage.

He went out and kneeled outside the ship and watched the fire rise up. As pinpoints of light from which the darkness could be held off. To grasp and to hold and to be the sign and portent for things in their becoming. In their beginnings. To serve as a beacon and a memorial for those yet unborn.

Held his face in the snow; would not sunder so much those flames with his eyes. Brother, is she the witness? Could she be? Forgive me, for I have not heard the word these many years and am still yet a fool. Even unto this end.

* * *

Ask her of their fate and the doubts will be stripped to nothing. That the children of gods are long dead and brooked no passage beyond purgatory. As their sins remanded. There can be no question of this. What did that oracle foretell? That she should be taken for a sign and be this exile's release. This can not be.

Be silent. Be silent.

_But follow her still, in that unlikely case._

* * *

In the midst of her trek, a pale whisper grew out of the land and the currents of curved wind strung along the ground like a river's eddy and which flowed snake-like and coiled through the turf rose up swiftly and in a great fury and in such a time that there was no preparation and she covered up her face against that mass. So she went blindly, forearm on forehead, the snow accumulating against her clothes and forming a blanket of white moss, forcing each step after next after next.

Starting down a small incline, she stumbled and fell into a large drift and in the time it took to free herself, a numb feeling began to work itself through her nose and her fingers and her feet, but it was unrecognizable to her and she went on heedlessly. The hour following, the creeping slumber ran up her legs and down her back and seeped through her pores like an anthrax and bit by bit, all aspects of her body gradually slid into the world's dominion. Breathing became labored, consciousness dimmed, along with the slower beating of her heart.

With that she fell amidst a sudden flurry and when the storm came and encompassed her fallen body, she saw things in between the swirls of ice. Daggers of frozen water. Teeth of a dead monster; burning fire in the sculptures of snowflakes thrown from the headwind. Texts stacked together. Ink and leather bound together in matrimony. Knowledge yet undimmed, the universe held captive by trimmed fingernails and uncalloused fingertips. Poems. Epics. Ballads. Tomes. Stories of all magnitude and virtue crushed into the embers of her breath.

Her father, her brother both faded away in the distance.

And finally the sound of a melody, old in nature and slow in tempo which she once knew but had forgotten in the years of her wandering; followed by the swift loss of reality into black.


	3. Meetings

Retort- His Dream- Risen Together

* * *

He found her by happenstance as much as his own tracking of her trail and when he drew near, a single judge, and a giant among its peers, stood by her, curious and nonchalant and frightening in the casual glint of its golden eyes as the truest and most embodiment of death and what courage he had stocked within himself by the appearance of the woman evaporated and left him parched and weak. It smelled her, and prodded her; examining her with the maliciousness of a critic.

Leave her be, he croaked, drawing close with his amphistaff stiff and ready. She was promised to me. You can not have her. Be gone. All the years of his training and survival ran from him and down his legs like water.

The judge turned to him and left the woman and drew near. A foul stench, a retched fused evolution of rot and choleric rusted blood. Deep stains in its pelt and the scars of past battles long and pink and warped along its chest and around its eyes. He could not say what this suzerain had seen and known but he feared it nonetheless.

I tell you again, you will not have her. He looked at the woman, still shaking, but something within her made itself known within him. A warmth almost. A hope. I have made an oath. His voice grew. An oracle promised her to me. Stronger still. I was rejected by the Avatar of the true God and I am the last of my race of fools and murderers. And I say to you, you will not have her. You will not. So go from here. Go from here and return anon when she is gone, to judge me and I will accept it.

It sniffed. Deep, deep breaths like the rumblings of the earth in the days of old when all just things were new and boiling and small. When it circled and smelled the pelt about him, it stepped back and with a single grunt of enmity, went down its own ways and paths.

He stood until the white fog encased it entirely and he sunk to his knees and thin layers of water blurred the world to him. Thank you God. Thank you. Though I know naught why mercy is given unto me. He went unto the woman and wrapped her in the cloak and began digging a shelter for the night with his hands yet all the while beseeching the lost and the dead.

* * *

His brother spoke to him before _the_ day in the belly of the worldship. Bare chest sculpted by the flickering shadows. Those few scars marked for the advancement of his life. The dragons in the fire flickering, fading, burning. The indiscernible features of his brother's face. Only the glitter of his eyes remained. Solid gold amber, tranquil and relaxed.

_Have you found them yet?_

No brother, he said. I have not. I searched amidst the texts; I fasted as the intendants directed. I plied the air with my prayers. There was nothing to be found.

_So your faith is still…_

I cannot say that it is lost for it has never been with me.

_I know this. Do you think that I could not understand my twin?_

No.

_Then let me hear you speak without this condescension._

I think that my eyes are weak. When I look upon all the god's work and gifts to us, I do not see something made by those who are infallible. I see mistakes, errors, unneeded accessories. When I hear the prayers during sacrifices, I hear history and clerical changes made for motivation. Where others charge heresy, I see choices. Alternatives of opinion. For all my efforts, I cannot find the gods. And yet….

_Is that what you have named your doubt? Bad eyes? Clogged ears? No. These things you speak of are excuses; aftereffects of what truly drives you._

Then tell me, what truth am I trying to speak?

_Your heart is not moved by thoughts above yourself. While others breasts' beat for the calling of our masters, yours yearns to be unshackled. Yours is a child that demands freedom from its parents._

Then there is no cure.

_No. There is not. But move your thoughts of this from your mind. You are yet a blessed soul._

Blessed? You sit there in your belief and call me blessed? There is a hallow in me that cannot be filled and you say that I am not cursed?

_Yes brother_, he insisted. _Yours is the blessing of doubt. The gods reward their faithful, that is true. And it is also true that those who fail to uphold their belief are punished at their dimming days. But those who doubt and find faith? They are the precious praetorite of heaven. Theirs is the high place closest to the thrones. The gods reward those who struggle for what they have obtained._

He stared into the burning embers, slowly dimming. Shadows grew large. The light left all to imagination.

_Faith_, his brother said, _cannot be found here by understanding if your mind provides no leniency. Instead, find the cliff of your doubt and jump into the darkness. Courage will be the yorik-et that brings you to the gods. And then tomorrow we can stride into the arena with the comprehension that we shall see each other amidst paradise no matter who falls._

* * *

There was no light when he rose and pushed off the ceiling of snow atop his shoulders and none when it crumbled off of him into a small growing pile. Night and the world still yet embraced in union. His breath misted out and fell to his feet, shards of diamond translated a shade of fog black. His skin prismed through crystal and all its distorted reflections as if were capable of being beyond one spectrum and dimensions beyond the one it so inhabited.

His scars; grotesque and beautiful and nothing more then a history of wrongs.

She groaned and unfolded herself in a stupor and came to. He handed her the gourd and said, Drink, and she did.

Eat, he said and she did.

After she had gotten her fill, she spoke to him. I told you not follow me.

I heard.

If I had seen you, I'd have shot you dead.

You see me now.

It's not the same.

I believe it is.

Well it isn't, alright. She squatted and cupped her face. Her face was flushed from the cold and dark circles marked her eyes. So I'll say it again cause you're either half deaf or dumb. Don't. Follow. Me.

She rose and stretched and gathered up her belongings and set the locket back under her shirt. She did so seamlessly and without halting in the same manner as a ritual. Like these actions were not unknown to her. Moving and gathering from each and every place. Accounting for cents in floor cracks and pocketing them.

We are progressing you and I, he said. You did not wish for my death.

Just cause I didn't state it doesn't mean it's still not there.

She turned and walked naught twenty paces before she perceived the crunch of his steps from her own. Pivoting, she looked at him and slowly pulled the weapon from her holster and thumbed off the safety. What are you doing?

I am not leaving you.

I can handle it.

That is what you said before, he did not look at her; instead glancing at the sky, the flat clouds, calibrating his senses and his body for the rigors of the day. And we both understand what that result was. He put up his hand to forestall her. You go to the monument, he said pointing to the mountains. I have been there myself long ago and can lead you through the mazes. Otherwise, death will come to you. To you and your unborn.

She grimaced, shivered. He knew little of their expressions, these humans. But even he could see the conflict in it. A furrowed brow and clenched jaw. Her eyes. I can't trust you, she said.

I gave you my oath.

Words are just words, she said to no one. Alright. With one hand she waved forward, Then lead on oh knowing guide.

And he did.


	4. Conversations and Sermons

History of Atlas- her first conversation with dead men- small epistolary- A minute sermon

Together they crossed the plains. He, shouldering her belongings without staunch effort and leading her by but two arms lengths, stayed to his oath and though she had none publicly made, she kept to her own and followed. Onward they walked, trudging through and against the pockets of sunken lands filled with snow up to their chests and which clung to their skins with small, hooks of ice and made of them a mosaic of the world's history- cold, cold, cold and the cold which brought upon the misery of pain unto those paroled into its borders came unto them and also other plagues- and against the hills and ridges which came out from the ground malformed and petulant like half-made giants of stone.

Amidst the horizoned pale fog, the mountains grew in stature and width and the blackness of their monads were salient enough to be distinguished and made separate.

And between them; save for the crunching of their footsteps and the crackling air and her labored breaths, there was silence and it was this that drove him to speak. For all these long years, he had kept his mouth shut to stave off the loneliness, speaking only for prayer or for those debates between himself.. The sickness unto death and the heaving shivers of their skin and the barbed arid throats and the And now, to be in this place without the words while she walked not far off behind was an agony of a sorts he was unacquainted with.

And he said-

Once, there were brothers born the same day of the same year. And when the older came into the world, he looked upon it and wailed at the sight and the caste members there were revolted and reached for their amphistaff to kill it. For when a child was born to the yuuzhan vong, it was judged in its fitness and capacity and if it found itself disgusted at the world- the begotten sacrifice of yun-yuzzhan, the creator who had poured out his own bowels to fill the void- it was cut down and cast aside and used as food for villips and koffees. And this was so even so for twins, whom by their nature were prized for their rarity and whose presence testified for the gods.

Now when the priests came upon the babe, the mother gave out a cry and his brother came to and was held aloft but no sound moved from his lips and when the older's gaze drifted to his twin he too fell silent. Those gathered there took this as a sign. That these two before them, though not brother and sister, were of relation to the twin gods and deserving of life.

And thusly, they were trained in the ways of the flesh and muscle, he said and spoke of the manners in which they were raised. The rituals of scarring throughout childhood. Along the forearms. Across and around the folds of the neck. Indentations along their spines. How each scar was carved into the skin with a special koffee blessed with the blood of all those proceeding the mark. Each and every forefather who had walked the path before them in glory and battle and death.

The trial of culling an amphistaff to bond with. Walking along the boundary between the grottos and groves through three days and three nights chanting without rest till two amphistaffs took heed and dug into their wrists full of venom and they lessened the beatings of their heart and abated it and did not succumb to the pain and the fevers.

This too he discussed in detail. For if there was but one, defining word of the yuuzhan vong, it was pain. The pain of birth, the pain of life, the pain of death, the pain beyond such. All things were under its jurisdiction and under the gnashings of its whip and most assuredly were the yuuzhan vong, ; the true heirs and children of yun-yuuzhan-; who had following their lord's dismembering sprung out from the congealed blood fully formed and armed and willing to break their hands upon the world and to mold it into its true and rightful image.

To be godlike was their essence. Their utmost desire. Their reason for being in its entirety and at the heart of this was pain.

The gods had bore this upon their shoulders. Each and every one of them in a differing manner. Yun Yuuzhan, creation, Yun-Yamka- conflict, war, Yun-Harla- the lies between all things, Yun Shuno- failure and shame.

And so to bear that burden was to be godlike. To go beyond the dim trappings of life and grasp at providence with one's own fingers and hands.

This was such for the yuuzhan vong and it was true for these brothers. That they too in their lives lived by such laws and conceptions of reality and truth. Each growing to their shared fate through the accumulation of scars and pain and battles between all calibers of foes and challenges. Inching, ever inching, towards a pinnacle which had come to them by way of their forefathers and by the stories they had spoken and inherited also.

This they followed samely. Trials and tribulations. Barriers placed on each child of God as a measure and a test of their capacities. Combat with other clans. Spectacles in front of convocations. Lessons in the embrace of pain upon the manner of salvation and of the unity brought to them through such devices. All the while investing themselves in each other; each placing within the other apportioned segments of themselves of which our very souls are comprised.

Fears. Hopes. Thoughts and actions. Dreams.

And what became apparent to the younger brother, who was in all things a template or idol by which each and every yuuzhan vong should aspire to- vetted by combat yet without arrogance, so skilled in speech he lectured all warriors present on the trueness of the way and the life- was the conflict within the older. An inner turmoil camouflaged by the appearances of piety- self-flagellation, prayers at all appointed times and places, bodily shapings done without utterance- but which was visible to the vigilant.

And so they discussed these things as the days tumbled down towards the ceremony of the twin gods which would anoint the coming invasion, most especially in the night before it. Gods and of their purpose and of the trueness of life and the way which men should follow. The manner by which one should conduct themselves within all things and the terror and hope that such profound isolation from faith was circumscribed of. The freedoms granted to each soul to carve out their own path among mountains and set ways.

So in that day, they both strode into the arena under the eyes of the overlord and twenty and one hundred thousand and did battle and in a single stroke the older took the younger's heart with his amphistaff and in sorrow forged himself into the memory of his brother and went to war chanting without hope while yet covered in that fratricidal blood.

Did she, that woman, listen to his words? He could not say nor would she. And as night fell, they dug a shelter and lowered themselves into the pit where the woman recoiled from his touch and slept apart from him throughout the night.

* * *

She conceived a world apart, of conflagrations above looming monuments of metal and concussions ringing through the ears of each and every living thing and driving into them the primal fear of death. Once neighbors ran about with possessions hung over their shoulders, mothers clutching babes to their chests and children weeping and dazed and gapemouthed at the coming onslaught. Cries and tears sparked by long bands of fire above them and by the flowering heat.

Her brother rested his hands upon her shoulders. Pale like snow and unblemished; trim fingernails concise atop the tips of his fingers. We need to get going. Pack only what you need, he said. His voice had a stoic quality. An almost perceptible hardness to it, hidden underneath his youth like granite. Were it not for his eyes, the veneer would have held- stiff lip, furrowed brow, clenched jaw- and given her a comfort.

They hurried into their home as the walls shook and the hanging relics began to fall down a clatter. Stark steel and polished copper wirings falling into scrap heaps. Their father's treasures and artifacts coming to their finality long postponed. In the light of dusk, cheap golden rays sprayed down from the window and enriched the dust and the air and what few things she gathered were rusted by it. Her life could be assembled from what things she gathered. Small trinkets. Little things of no consequence save to her. Notes and bracelets. Cards. A holo of them together snapshot across the table with none smiling save her. Earrings.

She bundled them with clothing and food and found him in the main room standing astride the pile, head braced against the wall, shoulders slouched as if in prayer like the spine of a sagging cathedral whose beams and buttresses were worn away by wind and rain. All old things in their entirety swept away and what childhood he possessed within that shell lifeless and cold and sloughed with the telltale signs of age; the broadness of his back and the stubble along his jaw and the worry in his skin. This was not always such nor should it be, yet it could not be disguised from her.

We're going to do fine. He spoke to the air or to nothing it all. I'll make sure of it. I will. Hand tight and pounding against the wall. Turning, he asked if she was ready and without prompting took their mother's locket from his pocket and held it glinting in the light. Scratched and marked as it was, the beauty of the forging still glinted, as even the indentations and the darkened etchings under the lettering shone in some manner. Years and more then memories were accounted for in this metal. Small meanings to greater truths. Smaller accounts for some greater ledger. Wholesale loss bought of chance and pain its representative.

She wore it around her neck with it pressed against her chest where the dwelling of her heart drummed against it. A deep and heady bass which ached now from this leaving. He swayed with the rumblings and the scattered cries outside their home. So little time and none of it had now.

It's yours now. Take care of it.

I will.

And there they paused and waited amidst the world being put to rest, counting the seconds, and in due time leaving, abject and sorrowful with the only words to distinguish such from an old miner's song.

On following stone walls by hand and reading the earth in its truth like palmists and blind men in their tombs.

* * *

When she woke, she could see naught but darkness and the unending tenebrosity of it drove into her the sudden seizure of helplessness. As though her arms and legs were dismembered and lost and she was left to face the world and its cold without dignity or hope like a babe or a dumb. Breathing quickly, breathing deep, she moved about. Returning the blood to her limbs and feeling about the confines with shaking digits.

Ice ground against their tip, jagged and malformed with end broken peaks. Bits of soft snow which dug their way under her nails and the air clutched with some vague presence and-

A hand touched her and the voice said, Be at peace girl. Peace. As though it were such an easy place to find and inhabit.

And though it was his hand- a thing composed of black blood, and dried skin and crisscrossed scars- it calmed her and she breathed and asked for the canteen. Somewhere in that mass of dark, what could only be the vong, shifted and placed it near her. It did not seem as if he had awoken or made any preparation for sleep. Nothing in his voice or movements said otherwise.

You were dreaming.

It was nothing.

A pause and then, That is a lie. I heard you speak of your brother.

She drank, rolling the water in her mouth, thinking of the cold and the coming day and the dream. I said it was nothing. Stop picking at i-

What did he tell you?

It wasn't anything. She went onto her side and laid out as to sleep.

You will learn in due time as I did then, he said, after a time, like a deep breath before a plunge. That when the dead do speak, so we must listen. That in all this world, there are no things so valuable as the words of those who have passed on this way before us.

Okay.


End file.
